The Atlasphere: An Ayn Rand dating site.
"The Atlasphere's mission is to bring together admirers of Ayn Rand's novels, from around the globe, to network both personally and professionally. For many people, Ayn Rand's novels are more than just 'a good read'; they inspire us to become better human beings."
Or, as Rosie Gray puts it: "Rand's 'Objectivism,' a philosophy of 'rational self-interest,' has been enormously influential. From what I understand, it has something to do with being an asshole."
So, assholes, you have your own networking and dating site now. (Look out, DList!) Congrats, Atlasphere!
This Is A Real Thing In The World
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
Parents, don't dress your girls like tramps.
Tramps? Seriously? CNN should really stop allowing Minerva McScold write their headlines after too many mint juleps.
And while they're at it, someone take away LZ Granderson's pearls, because between this piece and last week's "Don't Let Ignorant People Vote," he's clutching them so hard that I think he's cutting off oxygen to his brain.
Anyway, there is a lot to be said about this piece, but I'm just going to make four quick points:
1. Scolding "parents" for their children's clothing is effectively, by virtue of how most families still work, scolding mothers. There are, of course, two-father families, single father families, and two opposite-sex parent families with stay-at-home dads or dads who do the clothes shopping for kids, but in the vast majority of households, mothers are the primary purchaser of children's clothing and are primarily responsible for getting kids dressed every day.
2. This article would be garbage in any case, but it is even more garbagey by virtue of its utter failure to acknowledge the difficulty of finding a variety of clothing styles for young girls in department stores. If you live in a small town with one department store or Wev-Mart, you're stuck with whatever they put on their shelves, unless you've got the time and talent to make your kids' clothes. The internet has opened up options a bit, but if you're shopping on a budget, it can still be difficult to find variety at low cost.
3. Families who can't afford new clothes for their kids are dependent on whatever's being gifted or whatever they find at second-hand stores. Shaming "parents" without a caveat to acknowledge how many US kids wear hand-me-downs is absurd.
4. How girls dress would be moot if we didn't live in a culture that sexually objectified female people. And that's ultimately my biggest problem with this article: It tasks individual parents with the impossible challenge of successfully navigating a systemic dilemma. Don't dress your daughters in a way that will make people look at them in a way no one should be looking at them in the first place.
Granderson would almost certainly argue that he's just addressing an existent reality, which is true, but the problem with recommendations that avoid challenging that fucked-up reality head-on is that it more deeply entrenches that reality: Policing little girls' clothes and calling them "trampy" only reinforces a culture in which female bodies are sexually objectified and judged.
And in which there is no "right way" for female bodies to be dressed, anyway. Pants? Too mannish. Skirts above the knee? Slutty. Skirts below the knee? Frigid. Low-slung jeans? Whore! High-rise jeans? MOM JEANS. Button-up blouse? Too prim. Low-cut blouse? Too showy.
It's a game of Can't Fucking Win, and the only way to change the game is to stop playing it.
Whoooooooooops
The Dirty Hippies were right:
Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.Remember when anyone who suggested that the Iraq War was about oil was laughed out of the room and called a traitor? GOOD TIMES.
The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.
The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".
But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.
Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.
The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.
Question of the Day
We've done this one several times before, but the last time was more than two years ago now, and it's always fun, so I'm recycling it again: If you were asked to describe yourself using only one word, what word would you choose?
I'll stick with irrepressible, which, depending on context, can be either complimentary or critical—and both are certainly applicable when the context is me.
An Observation
Filed Under Things on Which Dudley and I Can Agree: One spoonful of peanut butter makes an excellent late afternoon snack on those feeling-peckish sort of days.
Filed Under Things on Which Dudley and I Cannot Agree: The level of hilarity when he gets peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth. I say: Maximum Hilarity. He says: Not Funny! Shut up, Two-Legs!
Number of the Day
5,466: The number of unionized public school teachers in Detroit who will be receiving layoff notices. That, by the way, is all of them: "It's unlikely that every layoff notice will result in actual layoffs, but under the district's union contract they must notify teachers who face potential job losses."
Detroit's public school system is facing a steep $327 million budget deficit that's been aggravated by slipping enrollment [Reuters reported a city population decline of 25% in the last year alone] and decreased state investment. The district-wide layoff announcement is but one of the emergency steps [Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager appointed to address Detroit's struggling public school system, has] taken to deal with the financial emergency. Back in February Bobb ordered half the district's schools shut down. He later announced that 41 of those schools would become charter schools. [Charters are publicly funded but independently run schools whose faculty are typically not unionized.]Class sizes of up to 60 students? Holy Maude.
Bobb's been shutting down schools for two years in a row, though. In 2010 he shut down 45 of the district's then-179 school system. Back in 2005 before Bobb was hired Detroit had to shut down 34 schools to deal with what was then a $200 million budget deficit. Bobb's Feburary plan approved consolidating schools and class sizes of up to 60 students.
Yep
Michael Stipe added, "Once, a duck she was cooking caught fire, and she threw it in the pool." Sure. Who wouldn't? You know how you're cooking for Jay-Z and the Seinfelds and the Sulzkefeller-Carnegiebilts, and the duck catches on fire so you have to throw it into the pool in the north garden, y'know, the one with the bust of Uncle Teddy...?
The typical story of an Everywoman!
[Via Gabe. Previously: Helpful Advice for Working Moms; Quote of the Day.]
Boehner lawyers up
Proving he and his GOP cohorts actually can sink lower, thankyouverymuch, Boehner & the Repubs have hired a high-priced, high-powered attorney to defend their position on DOMA:
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said Monday he’s seeking to reclaim from the Justice Department any money it would have spent fighting for the Defense of Marriage Act. House Republicans have also hired Paul Clement, a high-powered former solicitor general, to represent them on DOMA.Now there's some budget prioritization and job creation right there. Yep.
[...]
Mr. Boehner has now raised the stakes by his announcement and by his hiring of Mr. Clement, a nationally-known lawyer with conservative credentials.
“Obviously, DOJ’s decision results in DOJ no longer needing the funds it would have otherwise expended defending the constitutionality of DOMA,” Mr. Boehner wrote Monday in a letter to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “ It is my intent that those funds be diverted to the House for reimbursement of any costs incurred by and associated with the House, and not DOJ, defending DOMA.”
Daily Dose of Cute
Dudley lies on his big pillow munching on a pig's ear. Liss asks: "Dudley, do you feel better?" Dudley lifts his head, looks at Liss, and licks his lips. "Do you feel better now?" Dudley goes back to chewing on the pig's ear. "I'm gonna take that as a yes." [edit] Dudley chews on the ear and it pokes him in the eye. He is unphased. [edit] Dudley is done; the pig's ear has been demolished. He gently licks his paws and cleans up all the crumbs left on the big pillow, then looks up at Liss. "Hi!"Dudley went back to the vet on Saturday, just for a check-up to make sure everything looked good. (It did.) His eyes aren't totally back to normal yet, but the whites of his eyes are in the same galaxy as white again, which is a huge relief. In the meantime, he continues to be a good boy about getting his eye-drops and taking his antibiotics. Will behave for peanut butter!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
How to do it
Moments ago, the governing body of women's flat track roller derby (appropriately enough, it's named WFTDA, the Women's Flat Track Derby Association) issued its gender policy. The policy's not perfect (efforts to police gender aren't), but there's a lot I like.
Female[:] Living as a woman and having sex hormones that are within the medically acceptable range for a female.I still giggle every time I see the phrase "living as a woman", but wev. Females are people who identify as being female (i.e., females are people who are female).
The "acceptable range" is designed to have a certain amount of wiggle room. Again, WFTDA's policing gender (hence the "W"), but within that paradigm there are most certainly doctors that acknowledge that women (indeed, individual women over the course of time) have a wide-range of hormonal concentrations, all of which are "acceptable."
I'm not over the moon with this, but in my experience (n=1), cutting the amount of testosterone in my body cut into my strength and/or endurance. Of course, I'd been on anti-androgens for about six months when my daughter was born, so maybe getting fifteen minutes of sleep a night was part of it. In any case, WFTDA is operating under the standard assumption that large doses of testosterone increase one's athletic performance, and I don't feel like I'm in a position to argue with them.
There's no timeline here-- no six or twenty-four month waiting period.
Last but not least: genitals? WFTDA does not mention genitals. The International Olympic Committee could learn a thing or two here.
To participate on the chartered teams in WFTDA-sanctioned games, an athlete must be Female, as defined herein. Male athletes may not participate, nor can those born female or Intersex who identify as male.Hey look, people who identify as men don't get to simultaneously claim to be women as a result of 'underlying biology'!
Transgender or Intersex athletes who meet the definition of Female, as defined herein, are eligible to compete provided that, upon request, the athlete can produce a signed original statement, on office letterhead, from the athlete’s attending healthcare provider.
The testing is also "upon request", not as a bar for entry. My reading of the policy is basically that if someone's being a pain in the ass about a skater's gender, a quick letter from a doctor will take care of things, but really, teams shouldn't question the gender of skaters other teams' rosters.
It's also not clear to me how much of an external push there was for WFTDA to develop this policy. They just did it, which most certainly will make most trans skaters feel welcome.
As I said, gender policy is ugly, particularly where athletics is concerned. However, this is by far the most inclusive policy I've seen to date from a sport's governing body. That governing body, as well as its member organizations, are women-run, BTW. Good on WFTDA, and good on derby.
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, currently holding auditions for Deeky's New Boyfriend at the circus tent on the corner of Man and Main.
Recommended Reading:
Mustang Bobby: [TW for racism] Can't You Take a Joke?
Susie: What the Rich Don't Want You to Know about Taxes
rboylorn: [TW for trauma] The Joy(s) of Being a (Black) Woman
Andy: [TW for self-harm] Study: Gay Teen Suicides Higher in Conservative, Republican Areas
Audacia: RESURJ: Making a Feminist Statement at the United Nations
Arturo: Three Actors of Color We'd Rather See in The Crow Remake
Leave your links in comments...
Those Aren't Benefits
[Trigger warning for discussion of body size; rape culture.]
Oof. I've gotten a bunch of emails about this post at Sociological Images, titled "Some Benefits of Being Fat." It's a seriously (and uncharacteristically) failful piece, which notes that the alleged benefits are: 1. Making oneself "socially ineligible for the sexual gaze," owing to a belief that being fat "will protect them from being looked at, unwanted touching, and sexual assault," and: 2: Inoculating oneself against the possibility that "you would not be lovable, even if thin," represented by a PostSecret entry reading, "I'm afraid to lose the weight because I fear I will still be rejected by guys. At least when I'm fat, there is a clear reason why no one looks at me."
Let's take these one at a time.
One: As I have written previously, several studies have found associations between childhood sexual trauma and childhood and/or adult obesity, especially in girls and women (example), and while part of that may be a response to having been sexually objectified, exploited, and/or assaulted at a young age, part of it may also be attributable to compulsively overeating as an emotional salve. Children (for the most part) cannot access on their own the appropriate tools adults use to process trauma, like therapy. They can't access inappropriate tools adults use to cope with trauma, either; they don't have access to drugs or booze, but they do have access to food—and children in emotional distress can use food to self-medicate.
So, it's not a solid assumption that all women whose fatness is correlated with sexual trauma are deliberately trying to make themselves "socially ineligible for the sexual gaze." Fatness may be a side effect of a functional coping mechanism, unrelated to a conscious attempt to change one's body.
There are, however, women who consciously attempt to change their bodies after sexual trauma, in response to the pervasive cultural narrative that rape is a compliment, as well as all the associated myths about fat women being sexually unappealing. But, of course, fat and sexy are not mutually exclusive categories, and sex appeal does not predict one's chance of being raped, anyway: Women outside of the traditional beauty standard are victimized by sexual violence, too. A belief that fat will keep one safe from sexual violence is erroneous.
Which means that consciously/deliberately (or even unconsciously/inadvertently) making oneself fat is hardly a "benefit," by any traditional understanding of the word.
It is, naturally, an understandable strategy for a woman to take in response to being victimized, in a culture where individual women are primarily tasked with rape prevention. But that makes is a lot less a "benefit of being fat" than a reflection of a rape culture in which routine harassment of women, ubiquitous imagery sexually objectifying primarily thin women's bodies, narratives about rape being a compliment, and individual women being expected to find solutions to a systemic and epidemic crisis act in concert to make "change your body" seem like a reasonable response to sexual violence.
Two: To use one's fat as a shield behind which to hide, so you can assume that anyone who doesn't like you merely finds your body unattractive, is some real fat-hating shit—again, rooted in the myth that no one finds fat women sexually appealing. Fat hatred isn't a "benefit" of being fat. It's also hardly a "benefit" to deliberately stunt one's personal growth by avoiding serious self-reflection and axiomatically projecting fat hatred onto everyone who doesn't like you.
* * *
To be clear, I don't want to suggest that there aren't women who use being fat in these ways (and others), and I don't mean to suggest that those women are "bad" if they do. I am also not arguing that there are no benefits to being fat, especially on an individual basis where the biggest benefit of being fat may be not fighting with your body every day to try to get it to do something it just won't do. I cannot underestimate the value of living in a body with whom one has harmony, which one views as an integrated part of self, rather than a nemesis with whom one is engaged in a constant battle.
I just fundamentally disagree that becoming fat as a rape prevention strategy and/or staying fat as a way of avoiding personal accountability/development are among those benefits. And calling them beneficial actually plays into some pretty damaging anti-fat tropes, while failing to make abundantly clear that fat is not an impenetrable shield against rape plays into some pretty damaging rape culture narratives.
There's certainly a post that could have been written about how women use being fat as a survival strategy/defense mechanism, but it doesn't belong under a headline mislabeling those strategies/mechanisms as "benefits."
[H/Ts to Shakers Ariel, MMC, and Memyni.]
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
Five Types of Women Men Avoid. I'm hard-pressed to decide what my favorite part of this article is: The heterocentrism, the gender essentialism, the misogyny, the fact that these "types" are hardly specific to women (even if a designator like "gold-digger" is).
I'm pretty damn fond of the introductory "Editor's Note," though, in which running an article of rank misogyny is justified with: "As women, we're pretty picky when it comes to guys. We all have our list of deal breakers and don'ts that make us shy away from certain guys."
Yeah. Sure. An individual list of personal preferences, which every romantically-inclined human has, is exactly the same thing as broad generalizations rooted in ancient marginalizing tropes. Yeesh.
[H/T to Shaker Concatenate.]
Quote of the Day
"Thanks, poopheads!"—Mama Shakes, upon seeing that gas is now >$4.
Her exclamation of disgust in the general direction of the shadowy, nebulous "poopheads" who cause things to be Not the Way We Want Them to Be is really quite brilliant, sheerly by virtue of its versatile utility.
The economy stinks. Thanks, poopheads! There hasn't been a movie at the cinema I wanted to see in ages. Thanks, poopheads! We still don't have universal healthcare. Thanks, poopheads! The store was out of skim milk. Thanks, poopheads! Afghanistan is a quagmire of titanic proportions. THANKS, POOPHEADS!!!
It's a gem not seen since the likes of "What the Poop?" I recommend that it be put into regular rotation immediately.
Japan Update
Since the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan last month, the news stories that seem to be getting the most attention, and understandably so, are stories of hopefulness and happiness—found survivors, reunited family members, lost dogs returned to owners. But the reality for much of the affected area remains grim:
The death toll from Japan's earthquake and tsunami rose to nearly 14,000 on Monday as efforts continued to stabilize a crippled nuclear reactor plant.
Another 14,030 people are missing, according to Japan's National Police Agency. Police and soldiers still are combing the ruins of coastal villages in search of more bodies.
The March 11 magnitude 9.0-earthquake and the tsunami it spawned have killed 13,843 and displaced more than 136,000 people, police said Monday.
The tsunami also caused an ongoing crisis at a nuclear power plant that workers continue to fight.
On Monday, safety officials said that remote-controlled robots and the workers controlling them have recorded high levels of radiation inside and around two reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan. The tsunami damaged the plant's cooling systems, unnerving hundreds of thousands of people.
The U.S.-built robot probes measured radiation doses as high as 57 millisieverts inside the housing for reactor No. 3 and up to 49 millisieverts inside the No. 1 reactor building, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reported.
Levels found between the double doors of the airlocks of the reactor buildings were much higher -- 270 millisieverts in the case of reactor No. 1 and 170 millsieverts in No. 3, the agency said.
By comparison, the average resident of an industrialized country receives a dose of about 3 millisieverts per year.
You can donate to the ongoing relief effort here. Please feel welcome and encouraged to recommend other teaspooning opportunities in comments.
Game of Thrones
[Trigger warning for sexual violence and exploitation. Spoiler warnings for episode one of Game of Thrones. Please note this is my personal review of the show; I am not implicitly making any commentary on your reaction, your taste, your aesthetic, your principles, or anything about you at all.]
So. Game of Boners Thrones premiered last night, and, unfortunately, it turns out I was right to have been trepidatious about it. The start was promising enough, but one brothel orgy, two sets of brother-sister incest, one rape scene, and approximately a biebillion naked titties later, I was well and truly done.
Now, I'm not axiomatically averse to nudity and sexuality in film; some of the best feminist films contain nudity and depictions of sex. (And sometimes sexual assault.) I am, however, averse to gratuitous pornified images of naked women being inserted into entertainment in a way that treats their breasts like props. And I don't regard the line between the two as remotely fuzzy or difficult to navigate.
Leaving aside the exploitative nature of the storytelling, it's also just lazy and intellectually insulting. I am a grown-ass adult capable of understanding that Tyrion Lannister is a lech without actually hearing the slurping sounds while he gets a blowjob and seeing three naked prostitutes gifted to him by his brother. I have the faculties to discern that Viserys Targaryen is a horrible shit without actually having to watch him molest his teenage sister's breast. Etc. And if you can't communicate these characters' attributes without lingering close-ups on tits, then you are not a good filmmaker.
Ultimately, the substitution of exploitative female nudity for actual character development turns the show into "a bunch of dudes fighting for power—PLUS BOOBIEZ!" which is a story so old it whiffs of primordial ooze. It's some kind of brass chutzpah to advertise an epic fantasy and then deliver the narrative equivalent of professional wrestling.
But the true nadir of the episode was the scene of Khal Drogo raping his teenage bride, Daenerys Targaryen. As he removes her clothes, she covers her breasts; he moves her arms and tells her, "No." She asks him if he speaks the common tongue; he replies, "No." She asks him if no is the only word he knows in the common tongue; he replies, "No." The only thing he ever says in the scene is no.
I can't adequately describe my reaction to watching a scene in which a huge man is fixing to rape a petite girl, telling her, over and over, no no no. Her character, of course, is never allowed the say the word at all.
There will certainly be arguments that the show is depicting a medieval world and "that's how things were," or some variation on that theme. Sure. But presumably there weren't 10-year winters, either. It says something interesting, and not at all pleasant, about our culture that we are willing to accept a complete reinvention of the planet's climate for the purposes of fantasy, but not the possibility of a culture devoid of sexual exploitation and rape, as if the weather is just a suggestion but rape is immutable.
----------------------
Iain, who gets the credit for "Game of Boners," made a very good point about the show being on HBO. He noted if it had been on a network in which the filmmakers weren't able to insert nudity, it would probably have been a better show, and I think he's right. On AMC, say, they wouldn't have been able to rely on tit-propping to shorthand their way through actual character development.
Blog Note
In addition to Shakesville's new design featuring the Pink Petulance, I've added 70 new pieces from the past year to the Feminism 101 section.
Also: In the righthand sidebar, you'll find a new option to sign up to follow Shakesville by email.
Carry on!
